Blogging has been around since the early to mid 2000s, but has only recently become more of an “institutionalized” medium on the rise. As “Why Bloggers Can’t Replace the Work of Journalists” states, blogging is a form of citizen journalism, which essentially gives anybody a platform to discuss, post, and curate whatever they want. It is vastly different from professional journalism because journalists produce news stories and content on a global platform such as television and reporting. Bloggers just tend to comment on news stories that are already out there with a subjective approach, while journalists state facts and are more objective. Blogs can give anyone a voice, but they are also a dime a dozen because everyone is competing for a chance to have an established, successful blog. Newer bloggers are trying to latch onto bigger corporations such as CNN in order to have a recognizable online presence.
While I don’t think blogging will replace traditional news outlets such as reporting/journalism, I do think that it will eventually replace print media such as newspapers. People would rather read the news through social media, where they are able to have the quickest and newest information at the tips of their fingers. Blogs also offer insight to events, people, places, things, etc. It is an amateur perspective but audiences can decipher whether or not they want to follow a blog or a news story first. People also have shorter attention spans so they want to get to the details immediately. As blogs become more corporate, they will eventually become more reliable sources, as stated in “The Rise of the Professional Blogger”. Newspapers use fewer reporters and more blogs in order to have sufficient content for their stories.
As time goes on, I think blogging and reporting/traditional journalism will be able to exist side by side as reliable mediums in the world of media. One simply won’t replace the other just because they are different. Instead, I see them as two sources that could equally provide information to the general public.
